Social Media Marketing

Creating and Sharing Videos Online – Quick Guide

July 5, 2013 By Dan Thornton

The cost of creating videos has dropped dramatically in recent years, leading to an explosion in the footage being shot and uploaded across the web. From webcams and smartphones to RED cinematic cameras for motion pictures, the possibilities have never been more open. And the launch of Vine for videos via Twitter, and Instagram Video, means that short 6 or 15 second video clips have become viable tools for sharing ideas, content and marketing.

We’ve worked with talented video producers and helped with creating and sharing videos online for many years, and have achieved success with a number of brand channels. We also have plenty of experience in planning video production and distribution to get the most mileage from what can be expensive, and is often a time-consuming way to generate content.

Creating great videos:

The most important aspects of great video content are simple to prioritise:

Great content
Production and Editing
Marketing and Distribution

1. Great Video Content:

The definition of great video content is not an epic Hollywood script and production. Sometimes huge audiences are simply the result of being in the right place at the right time, but often it’s the result of creating content which is interesting, informative, entertaining, shocking or funny.

The key is to have your objective at the front of your mind. If you’re looking to sell a service or product, your aims and content will be different to someone launching themselves as the next great comedian on Youtube.

With each video, you should have a clear aim – is it primarily to build awareness, encourage people to click to visit your site, or help them to better understand and use your product?

The legendary Charlie Bit My Finger grew into a business after becoming immensely popular, simply by being entertaining.

Keep the viewer in mind at all times. Unless there’s a dramatic reason, you want them to see and understand the reason for watching your videos as quickly as possible – if you need to include company branding etc, there are better ways to do it than a huge introduction clip, which is a slight fail for the famous ‘Will It Blend’ series – but the hook is enough in this case to suffer through it:

Do your research – check out what is popular and successful for your immediate competitors. How would you improve upon what already exists and offer something better?

Enthusiasm is vital. Who hasn’t watched a screencast or software tutorial delivered with all the flair of a tax audit?

2. Production and Editing:

While you don’t need high production values to achieve success, they’ll definitely improve your odds. Beyond an adequate camera or webcam, the two biggest problems with most videos are lighting and audio.

Audio can often be solved by investing in equipment such as a decent cabled lapel mic or a Bluetooth remote version for presenters. Or a decent microphone for recording to your computer for screencasts, webinars and more.

Meanwhile lighting can be solved by thinking carefully about location, and potentially using some cost-effective solutions to add some illumination to the subject.

Consider this example, in which audio is a key part (note the microphone in shot), the lighting is serviceable, but by combining shots together it achieves a great result without adding anything unnecessary:

When it comes to editing software, the choices range from free open source programs to professional video editing suites. But it’s not what you use, it’s how you use it:

Brevity and clarity is key
Make sure intros or overlays are as short as possible, and consider using clear, readable text to convey information to shorten the length of videos.
Use overlays to also cover links for more information.
Film in sections for longer videos, which allows you more editing freedom, and to change location etc to keep an audience interested.
Hide cuts with transitions such as full screen graphics, jump cuts etc, but don’t overdo it.
Editing will always take much longer than you first imagine, so leave plenty of time in your schedule.
Try to pay attention to the techniques being used in your favourite and the most popular, videos.

3. Digital Video Distribution:

Although Youtube is the most popular video channel on the web, there are several other locations which can also attract an audience. If you plan to cut and share content across these channels from the start, you can deliver far more mileage for your investment.

Video sharing sites:

Youtube
Dailymotion
Vimeo
Metacafe
Vine (6 second clips via Twitter)
Instragram Video (15 second clips)
Facebook

Uploading each individual to multiple locations can be time-consuming, but you can also utilise services such as OneLoad from TuebMogul, which lets you upload once and then automates delivery to multiple platforms.

For each site, ensure you have set up your channel with the correct avatar and profile images (We have a guide for social network images)

Think carefully about how you title your video. Ensure it is clear and contains the relevant keywords for search.

Optimise your description to build on the information in the video – include relevant links and supporting info which doesn’t need to clutter the video itself.

Add relevant keywords, including your brand name. By including your brand name as a keyword, it encourages video sites to include any other videos from your channel as related content.

Finally, make sure you’re sharing your own content across the various channels you have access to. Blog about it, and make sure you use it when it’s relevant to answer customer questions to lower your customer service time and costs, for example.

Top social networks: Guide to images for company pages

May 13, 2013 By Dan Thornton

Are you setting up social network profiles for your business? Or maintaining social media which already exists? Either way, it’s important to make sure your pages and profiles look their best.

If you’re updating your company logos, re-branding, or simply want to change images to give your page a refresh, then it’s important to ensure you know the right image dimensions, file sizes and positioning for each social network. So we’ve compiled the requirements in once place.

When looking at logo designs, always keep in mind that social media generally requires versions which will work in a rectangular landscape format (Cover images), and also a version which will work as a smaller, square image (Profile images).

Facebook Pages Images:

There are two images to maintain for a Facebook page.

Cover Photo: This should be 851 pixels wide x 315 tall. Smaller images must be at least 399 pixels wide and will be stretched to this larger size. Smaller file sizes will help quicker load times, and Facebook recommended a .jpg which is less than 100kb in size.
They must include no more than 20% text.
Profile Picture: This should be at least 180 x 180 pixels square, which will then be displayed at 160 x 160 pixels. Leave space around your image or text to allow for cropping of the image.

Cover photo guidelines state that you should use a unique image to represent your page which can’t be ‘deceptive, misleading, infringe on anyone else’s copyright or be in violation of the Page Terms. You may not encourage people to upload your cover photo to their personal timelines.’

You should also account for your profile image being displayed on top of your cover photo, which is a 160×160 square starting 23 pixels from the left edge.

Twitter Profile Images:

A Twitter page requires three images to be complete. Photo and Header Images are located under Account settings. Background images are changed under the Design setting.

Photo Image: The photo image appears throughout Twitter. It’s a 73 x 73 pixel square, with larger files able to be uploaded. File size can be up to 2MB in JPG, GIF or PNG formats.
Header Image: This appears behind your profile information on your Twitter page. It’s recommended to be 1252 wide x 626 high, and with a maximum file size of 5MB.
Background Image: The background image can be up to 2MB in size, with no fixed dimensions as you can choose to Tile your image if desired, although we wouldn’t recommend it! In general, a 1600×1200 .JPG image will be the right dimensions for your Twitter background.

When designing a Background Image, remember that the navigation menus on a Twitter profile will take up significant space beside the Twitter feed. Limit graphics to under 200 pixels from the left-hand edge to ensure they can be seen clearly.

Google+ Page Images:

Two images are needed for the Google+ page for your company:

Profile Picture: These have recently been changed to display as a circular profile image, meaning that your 250 x 250 square dimensions now need to account for circular cropping with plenty of space around the focal point of your image.
Cover Photo: Cover photos are now displayed in a 16:9 ratio, with a size of 2120 wide x 1192 high to display properly.

Youtube Channel image sizes:

As another Google property, the new ‘One Channel’ designs for Youtube are similar in some ways to Google+. Again, there are two images required:

Profile Picture: Currently still a square image, so we use a 240 x 240 square which then displays at smaller sizes.
Channel Art: A single 2560 x 1440 pixel image which can be optimised to display properly on different devices with a safe 1546×423 central area which works across platforms, a wide area for tablets, larger desktop displays, and the full image on TVs. A template is available to download from Youtube’s help page.

Notice that on your page, the Profile Picture will sit in the top left of your Channel Art.

LinkedIn Company Page Images:

LinkedIn requires 3 images for a company page.

Image: 2MB PNG, JPG or GIF, which must be 646×220 pixels or larger.
Standard Logo: Max 2MB PNG, JPG or GIF which will be re-sized to 100×60 pixels.
Square Logo: Max 2MB PNG, JPG or GIF which will be re-sized to 50×50 pixels.

Don’t forget to click Publish after adding your Image, or it won’t be saved.

Flickr Profile Image Requirements:

Photo sharing site Flickr has unveiled a new design effective from May 21, 2013, which now includes a Cover Photo on the profile page for every user.

The selection of photos for both Cover Photos and Avatars are both limited to either new uploads or Recent Photos.

Cover Photo: There’s no official size guidelines, but looking at how the page displays above, the Cover Photos is approximately 1349 pixels wide by 235 pixels high. The Flickr navigation menu stretches 45 pixels down across the top of the image, with the username, avatar image, and other information stretching up 120 pixels from the bottom.
Profile Photo: 300 x 300 pixels square

General profile tips:

There are numerous other social networks which we could have also included, ranging from Pinterest and Instagram to Reddit and Stumbleupon. Most simply require a square profile image, but let us know if you’d like to see any additions to our list above.

We’ll keep this page updated with the latest changes, so it might be worth bookmarking us, or following us on one of the above social networking sites to make sure you’re up with the latest designs.

Why your business must own its content

January 22, 2013 By Dan Thornton

Businesses can hire office space from as little as an hour of time, can lease hardware or make use of cloud computing solutions, and can compete on a relatively level playing field online with just a cheap hosting account. But conversely, it’s never been more important to own the central location where you’re creating and publishing your content.

There’s a timely reminder of the terms and conditions for LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook by Luke Brynley-Jones, which highlights the extensive agreements you make when signing up to a social network for yourself or for your business. For example you grant LinkedIn the rights to distribute and commercialise:

any user generated content, ideas, concepts, techniques or data to the services, you submit to LinkedIn, without any further consent, notice and/or compensation to you…”

At the same time, those companies are also looking to attract more users from search and other social networks in exactly the same ways as you are. Check out this insightful post by John Battelle – Portrait of Twitter as a young media company. And consider the widely reported launch of Facebook’s Graph Search. Or how Google is unifying everything around the Google+ backbone – business pages, local map listings etc.

Leverage external sites, but own yours:

We actively advocate the use of social networks, and assist companies in making the most of those opportunities. But quite often we’re asked why a client should bother running a blog, website or their own community?

Not only are there risks in relying on a third party to always be available (See the current uncertainty over the future for Posterous for a good example), but in a time where content and content marketing are becoming ever more important to business, do you want to be allowing a variety of services the opportunity to distribute, commercialise and benefit from your content?

There are benefits in allowing people to access, use, and re-use your content – this blog, for example, is licensed under Creative Commons, but that was our choice to make, and not pushed onto us by any terms and conditions. It also comes with the restriction that any distribution has to be accompanied by attribution, and is non-commercial. That attribution means that sharing will help this site benefit in terms of inbound links and search engine optimisation.

In terms of business assets, you need to own your content, and the benefits that will come from it . It’s more important than a nice office for attracting customers, and changing your perspective will encourage you to devote the time and effort required for high quality articles which will help you rise above the coming content marketing deluge.

And if you’re struggling with how to start tackling that challenge, we can help break down the website set-up, content and social media strategy, and the tactical implementation, for you – or even supply high quality articles which are prepared in conjunction with you, to ensure they’re exactly how you want to portray your business, and exactly what your customers want or need to read.

The big challenge for social media attribution

January 21, 2013 By Dan Thornton

Tracking the effect of social media can be a challenge, particularly in regards to attributing conversion rates and sales in areas such as eCommerce. A study just released by Adobe puts social as the source of 2% of traffic to U.S retailers, in comparison to 40% coming directly, and 34% from search.

That’s probably accurate in terms of direct traffic sources to those websites, but it’s not the whole picture. And I have a particular example to illustrate it.

Time – an enemy of attribution?

Back in 2004, a film named Fröken Sverige was released, starring Alexandra Dahlströhm. It was the same year Facebook launched for Harvard students, the year after the arrival of Myspace, and two years before Twitter arrived. It was also the first film to star Dahlströhm since her debut in 1998, in a great Lukas Moodyson film.

In March, 2007, I joined Twitter.

During the next two years, I met a lot of great people online, and followed up by meeting a fair number of them in person. One of the people I started following and occasionally chatting with was @Sizemore, who is best described by his About page as writing for TV and film.

He’s a great example of someone who I would have never probably met if not for social media, and whose tastes are generally not too far from my own – and when they are, there’s normally still things of interest in there.

So I noticed when he praised Fröken Sverige in 2009.

And added it to my Amazon wish list, plus bookmarked it as a film to buy. But at the time, it was pretty expensive. It was also impossible to find on streaming services, and I even checked whether it could be found on any sharing sites.

Now more than 3 years later, I happened to be going through old lists and decided to see whether it was available for a more reasonable amount. A secondhand copy was on offer at a decent price, and a few days later it arrived – it’s now sat next to my laptop to encourage me to finish work so I can finally watch it!

So that film took 9 years to arrive in my house, 3+ years after a personal recommendation from a website, and probably 4+ years after I happened to start following Sizemore on Twitter.

Finally obtained. 8 years after release and 3 since @sizemore recommended it

There’s no cookie or tracking software which can account for that. And yet, that purchase would not have happened if I hadn’t signed up to Twitter and spent time actively using it.

Can the gap be closed?

Is there any way to close that knowledge gap for a retailer, without either largely removing the privacy of a consumer by tracking and cross-referencing everything they’ve ever seen (Which could be a potential end goal for Google and Facebook)? This particular example stuck in my mind, but the same process is happening much more often and is going uncredited by me, let alone analytics software.

Or should we accept that some circumstances are just unknown, and online word-of-mouth is at least more visible than the offline equivalent?

With current technology, I’d suggest that the trending growth of social media traffic and attributable conversions is an indicator of how it’s really changing, but that it underestimates the impact by a considerable degree. It’s easier for clients who have traffic-based businesses, such as media companies – they just need people to visit their site, which is an instantaneous decision.

It’s also why I always recommend combining a variety of traffic sources, and making allowances for how accurately each can be traced.

But I wonder if any conversion rate specialists have other answers? We’ll be posting a follow up on Wednesday with some answers to this challenge.